Wortell weblog

Weblog van de specialisten van Wortell

Silverlight

Pivot for Silverlight is now available!

29 06 2010

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Silverlight | 1 Comment

The last few months Wortell has been playing with the Silverlight bits for Pivot.
Today the Pivot team has released the PivotViewer Control for public download.

For more information on Pivot, have a look at the Pivot website at http://getpivot.com

On the Silverlight portal you can find more information on the PivotViewer Contol at http://www.silverlight.net/learn/pivotviewer/

Danny wrote a post on the Pivot desktop version a little while back. In his article he show you the FIFA World Cup matches. We will make this soon available in Silverlight.

I will also soon write an article on getting you pivot collections in to the cloud using Azure.

Go and play, it’s powerful stuff

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Live Labs Pivot for the 2010 FIFA World Cup

10 05 2010

Posted by Danny Burlage in .NET Framework, Application Platform, Silverlight, Wortell | 2 Comments

Live Labs Pivot is a great tool to publish large amounts of data in a compelling way. To showcase this new Microsoft Technology Wortell has created an example of a Live Labs Pivot table for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The video below shows how this pivot works. Do you want to play with it yourself? Download Live Labs Pivot here and then open the collection, but putting the following link in the address bar of Pivot: http://media.wortell.nl/pivot/wk/wk2010.cxml

And here are some screenshots:


When a specific flag is clicked details about the country are shown.

How we did it…

Basically a Pivot can be created programmatically or by using Excel. Excel can be used in situations where the data can be easily copied of filled in by hand. If there is data coming from multiple systems, backend or environments or if you are handling a large amount of data we recommend creating the XML schema programmatically.

First of all we selected the sources of the data. We used Wikipedia for the schedule of plays and the FIFA website for the descriptions of the individual teams. We then put all this data into a Pivot Collections Excel sheet. You can read the description of this Excel sheet on the Microsoft site where the plugin can also be downloaded. Once all the data was put into the Excel sheet we simply Published the collection from the Excel plugin and the Live Labs Pivot was finished.

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Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework v1.1 Released

21 01 2010

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Silverlight | 1 Comment

In November of last year, Microsoft release SFM, Silverlight Media Framework PDC Release.
We have been using IIS Smooth Streaming en different projects at Wortell.
On my current project for education we are using Silverlight Media Framework as well, where we are building exiting tooling around the SMF player for teachers and students.

With the SFM 1.1 release, progressive download is now fully supported making the SFM a fantastic framework to build on for any kind of video playing.

Updates in version 1.1 release

  • Progressive Download is now fully supported.
  • Integration with the SmoothStreamingMediaElement Beta 2 Release

You can download SFM 1.1 on codeplex.

On silverlight.net you can find how to videos on SMF to get you up to speed:

Embedding The Video Player
Styling And Templating The Video Player
Extending The Video Player
Out Of Stream Data Access
Using Application Settings
Creating Custom Timeline Markers
Building A Custom Bitrate Meter
Using SMF Logging
Live Mode vs. VOD
Hosting VOD using IIS Media Services

and / or download code samples

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Silverlight website shows Wortell as showcase.

8 12 2009

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Office Communications Server 2007R2, Silverlight, Unified Communications | 1 Comment

Silverlight.net is the official Silverlight community website from Microsoft. I am excited to see that they have added the Wortell website to their showcases.

Silverlight plays a large role in our website. We created a fun integration with Microsoft Unified Communications Server. Deep Zoom and IIS Smooth Streaming are used throughout the website. In our references page we use Silverlight for filtering.

Go have a look  http://www.silverlight.net/showcase/ add done forget to give your rating!

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A preview of what is to come with Office Communicator 14 development

24 11 2009

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Office Communicator, Silverlight, Unified Communications | 2 Comments

One of my favorite Microsoft products is OCS. I don’t know why but I can get very excited about this product. One of my last projects was the “Our people” on the Wortell website. Here we used OCS to show the presence status of our colleagues in Silverlight. (This reminds me that I still have to write a post on how it was build.)

At PDC last week the OCS team had two session on their next release:

 In this post I’ll try to give you a shore summary of what’s to come.

 OCS 14 Managed API
A new fully managed API adopting standard .NET. What we can see from the demo’s is  that there will be less code writing.

Support common applications
Support for Silverlight 4, Visual Studio 2008 and up, Blend 3 and up, .NET 3.5 and up, IE 7 & 8

 WPF and Silverlight controls
Drag and drop controls for WPF and Silverlight. Seems like there will be controls for all the features: 

  • Search controls: Search input and search results
  • Browse contacts
  • View contacts
  • Contact details as contact & hover cards
  • Presence

Docking OCS windows in WPF and WinForms
Conversation window can be docked in your own applications

Conversation Contextual Information
You can send and receive contextual information for you custom application to the Communicator window. Contextual information is data that send to you calling party to quickly bring them into the same context as the context that you are in. An example is that you receive an email and you click on the sender presence symbol to start a conversation. The sender gets an OCS message. In this message a link is show to the email from where you started the conversation. When the calling party clicks this like the same email will be opened. You could do the same for you custom applications.

Menu extensions
You can add you own applications to the Communicator menu. Menu items can be added to right click main window and to the Contact Card overflow window.

Shell execution
You can shell execute your custom application and pass SIP URI’s

Conversation Window extension
A window can be attached to the conversation window. This is much like the Windows Live Messenger activities. This window has access to the conversation data. A very nice feature is, unlike now, that the conversation window stays open after the conversation has ended. This gives the user to do something with the conversation data afterwards. Seems like the OCS team does listen to their users.  And best of all, native Silverlight hosting. (so we only develop an application once J)

Extend communications to role specific kiosks
Meaning that your custom application can start a conversation without being a contact itself. This is great for hospitality like applications!

 It looks like great improvements and I’m getting all excited again. In January the Merto will start, I can’t wait to get my hands on the bits and start playing.

Keep you posted, happy programming

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Cool new way to work with data with Pivot

18 11 2009

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Application Platform, SQL Server, Silverlight | No Comments

Microsoft Live Labs has released great new tools to work and display data.

Get excited and go watch the video on their site. Also be sure to get an invite to start playing with this technology!

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(Silverlight) RIA Services updates

18 11 2009

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Silverlight | No Comments

Currently I am working on a project HAN Talent where we use Silverlight RIA Service. The only version out until today was the first CTP version.

Today there are two new beta version released now called WCF RIA Services BETA. One release is for Visual Studio 2008. The other one is for Visual Studio 2010 BETA 2. Guess what I’ll be doing tomorrow :)

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Silverlight Media Framework

18 11 2009

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Silverlight | No Comments

Another release from Microsoft today for us Silverlight people, the Silverlight Media Framework (SMF).
With this framework developers can create media players for IIS Smooth Streaming.
In the Wortell website IIS Smooth Streaming is used a lot. (Peak):

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Silverlight 4 beta now available!

18 11 2009

Posted by Roeland Jimenez in Silverlight | No Comments

Here are some links to get started. Will come with more soon!

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Hele gave opdracht

10 11 2009

Posted by Robert van Son in .NET Framework, Silverlight | 2 Comments

Vandaag heeft Wortell de opdracht gekregen van Hogeschool Arnhem Nijmegen (HAN) om HAN Talent de ontwikkelen. HAN Talent is een applicatie bedoeld voor de faculteit Nederlands. Zij geven onder andere les aan buitenlandse studenten die Nederlands leren. Onderdeel van de studie is het uitvoeren van opdrachten als: koop een bruin brood bij de bakker. De bedoeling is dat de student vervolgens samen met medestudenten de opdracht uitvoert terwijl hij of zij wordt gefilmd. Het geschoten filmpje wordt vervolgens ge-upload naar een website. Het filmpje wordt hier omgezet naar een voor het web geschikt formaat en gekoppeld aan de betreffende opdracht. Medestudenten kunnen vervolgens commentaar leveren op het filmpje. Dit commentaar wordt opgeslagen bij het filmpje. Hierdoor kan de student het commentaar van zijn medestudenten terug lezen en hiervan leren. De docent kan een opdracht formeel beoordelen. De student krijgt 3 kansen om de opdracht goed uit te voeren (lees: maximaal 3 filmpjes uploaden per opdracht).

Een innovatief onderwijs concept dat vraagt om een innovatieve oplossing. Wortell heeft het functioneel ontwerp inmiddels klaar en voorgesteld om deze applicatie te ontwikkelen met behulp van Silverlight, gebruikmakend van Silverlight streaming om de video’s te tonen. Daarnaast wordt de rest van de site, denk aan beheer schermen voor het onderhoud van klassen, studenten en opdrachten ook volledig in Silverlight gerealiseerd. Zo wordt een zeer rijke applicatie gerealiseerd, die volledig in de browser beschikbaar is. Delen van de applicatie kunnen eenvoudig “out-of-the-browser” beschikbaar worden gesteld. Zo kan een student een aantal films lokaal naar zijn laptop trekken en ze vervolgens offline bekijken en commentaar leveren. Zodra hij weer online komt, wordt alles gesynchroniseerd. Silverlight is prachtig :) Daarnaast maken we, voor de nerds, gebruik van RIA services om het entiteiten model snel en effectief uit de database op te zetten. Voor de player hebben we ons laten inspireren door project Tuva van Microsoft Research.

Blijft de vraag over: waar en hoe host je een dergelijke applicatie? Het is zeer bandbreedte intensief; dat wil zeggen, tijdens piekbelasting. In de vakanties zal het nauwelijks worden gebruikt. Welk hosting platform schaalt met deze behoefte mee? Antwoord: Windows Azure. Voor wie het niet weet: Windows Azure is het cloud computing platform van Microsoft. Het biedt alle technische ondersteuning om HAN Talent de hosten en is enorm schaalbaar. Je betaalt gewoon per GB aan bandbreedte die wordt gebruikt. Zie voor meer informatie de site van Microsoft over Azure.

Al met al gaan we voor HAN Talent de aller nieuwste technologieën van Microsoft inzetten. Windows Azure zal (naar verwachting) deze maand beschikbaar komen. RAI services zijn hopelijk voor het eind van dit jaar uit CTP en Silverlight 3 is net een paar maanden oud. De developers die dit gaan doen gaan een zeer spannende, uitdagend maar vooral heel mooie tijd tegemoet.

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